Hi Dennis:
You may be interested in the following article extolling the virtues of
removable hard drives for backup purposes that I recently prepared for a
local computer club.
Re your comments about connecting the hard drives: Over the past year or so,
we (myself and some techie friends) have done numerous experiments
configuring IDE/ATAPI devices in every conceivable position relative to the
IDE primary & secondary channels, and we consistently come up with the same
results, i.e., it doesn't seem to make a dime's worth of difference as to
how one sets up one's devices in terms of Primary/Secondary, Master/Slave
combinations. Whatever speed differences we can discern (a rarity in itself
and not always consistent when present) are negligible with respect to
real-life use of the personal computer. Our tests have focused on the
practical aspects of using a computer, e.g., moving, copying, deleting,
installing files; accessing & manipulating large graphics/video files and
the like. We've long since given up on the theoretical tests that purport to
measure speed differences. They don't just seem to equate with the tasks a
computer user encounters daily.
In view of our experience we install these devices guided solely by whatever
physical arrangement makes the most sense in a particular case as well as
the potential user's preference as to their arrangement.
Anyway, here's the article...
The Value of Removable Hard Drives
One of the most frequent topics on any newsgroup dealing with operating
systems or when computer users get together, is what's the best strategy for
backing up one's hard drive. Hardly a day goes by where you don't come
across literally dozens, if not scores, of postings on the various
newsgroups relating to this subject. The queries (and responses) invariably
focus on the problems the user has encountered in using this or that
software backup program - either some third-party program or whatever
built-in backup program is included with the user's operating system.
In my opinion, the best backup system for the average home user and even
small business owner in most cases is having his or her desktop computer
equipped with two removable hard drives. There are other advantages in
having two removable hard drives on one's computer but the most significant
one is providing a near fail-safe backup system. The speed, flexibility and
peace of mind you get with this arrangement far outweighs (for most users)
the relatively small additional cost of equipping one's desktop computer
with this hardware configuration.
Using this setup, backing up your hard drive is simple, straightforward,
fast, and most important of all -- effective. By easily and relatively
quickly making a clone of your hard drive, using a software program like
Symantec's Norton Ghost which is specifically designed for this purpose, you
get, what seems to me, the ultimate backup solution given the present state
of personal desktop computer technology. Unlike backup programs that merely
back up your data files - that is, the files you've created in the various
programs and applications you use - by cloning your hard drive, you're
backing up your operating system, your registry, all your programs and
applications, your configuration settings, your data files - in short,
everything on the hard drive from which you're making a bit for bit copy.
And you're doing this in one fell swoop. So for all practical purposes you
have an exact duplicate of your hard drive. And for added safety you can
remove this newly-cloned hard drive from the premises, not to mention making
another clone, if desired, for near-absolute security.
So when the day comes - as it surely will - that your hard drive fails
because of some mechanical or electrical defect, it's a wonderful feeling to
know that you have a perfectly good copy of that failed hard drive that you
simply shove in the computer, boot up, and you're off and running. Or if you
ever get some miserable computer virus that plays havoc with your system,
isn't it nice to know that you have at hand a perfectly good virus-free
clone of your hard drive? And then simply clone that "good" previously
cloned hard drive to the virus-infected one so that once again you now have
two perfectly good hard drives. And in the case where the hard drive is
kaput because of some mechanical/electronic failure, you purchase a new hard
drive, simply remove the defective drive from the removable tray, plop in
the new one, make two simple connections, shove it in the computer and then
clone your good hard drive to the new one. There's no need to partition and
format the new drive; no need to reinstall your operating system on the new
drive, no need to reinstall your programs and data files. None of this is
necessary. By simply cloning the previously-cloned hard drive to the new
drive you once again have two functioning hard drives at your disposal. And
the added beauty of this arrangement is that you do all this from the
comfort of your computer chair. There's no need to take apart your computer
case in order to get into the guts of your computer and make complicated
cable connections. Everything is done outside of your computer because each
hard drive resides in a tray (caddy) that you simply slide into the computer
's mobile rack.
As previously indicated, these mobile rack devices are two-part affairs -
the rack itself and the inner tray that slides into the rack. In my case I
use the Lian Li RH-42 all-aluminum mobile racks which are generally
available from a number of vendors on the net. I've purchased mine from an
online vendor, Directron.com who sells them 2/$66 (plus shipping). I'm sure
mobile racks from other manufacturers will serve the purpose just as well. I
'm aware of many users who have been using inexpensive (about $10 each)
plastic mobile racks without any problems whatsoever. Unfortunately, there
is no industry standard involving the design and construction of the racks
nor the inner trays that contain the hard drive. The result of this is that
there is (usually) no interchangeability of these trays among the various
manufacturers of mobile racks. Indeed, there is frequently no
interchangeability of the trays among different models from the same
manufacturer. This lack of interchangeability may not be an issue if the
user will be purchasing a particular model of mobile rack for a single
computer, however, if the user will have access to other computers, he or
she may want to settle on a specific brand and model of mobile rack that
will provide for tray interchangeability amongst different computers.
As I've previously indicated, the cloning process itself is easy and fast.
Using Symantec's Norton Ghost cloning program as an example, with the two
removable hard drives connected to the computer, you simply boot up your
desktop computer with the floppy disk that contains the Ghost program and
after a few key clicks the cloning process begins. One of my current
computers has an Intel Pentium 4 2.0 GHz processor, and I can clone one hard
drive to another at the rate of nearly 1 GB per minute. (We normally set up
our hard drive IDE devices as Primary and Secondary Masters, finding that
this arrangement yields the fastest cloning speeds without any negative
speed impact on the other IDE devices, e.g., DVD-CD/ROM and CD-RW drives,
that are connected as Primary and Secondary Slave devices). Depending upon
the speed of your processor and hard drives you should get cloning speeds of
somewhere between 700 MB to 1.5+ GB per minute. The cloning process is
practically automatic and you need not be in attendance during the actual
cloning operation. Incidentally, the size or make/model of your hard drives
need not be identical; all that matters is that your destination drive
contains sufficient capacity to receive the contents of your source drive.
I should point out that the hard drives in their mobile racks are not
"hot-swappable", i.e., you must not insert or remove the tray containing the
hard drive from the mobile rack while the computer is powered-up. It is
necessary to shut down the computer before inserting or removing trays. This
is a minor inconvenience, but necessary to prevent the possibility of data
corruption or even physical damage to the hard drive(s). Actually, there is
a keylock mechanism on the mobile rack so that you can safely (presumably)
remove the tray after turning the keylock to the "Off" position. But for
absolute safety's sake we prefer to disengage the tray from the rack (or
reinserting it into the rack) after shutting down the computer.
I can virtually guarantee that once you begin working with two removable
hard drives, you'll have but one regret and only one regret. And that is you
didn't have this arrangement on your previous computer or computers. There's
perhaps one negative to this arrangement and that is the additional cost
involved in having the two mobile racks to house the hard drives, the
additional hard drive, and the software cloning program. I would estimate it
adds roughly about (U.S.)$100 to $200 (as of September, 2003) to the cost of
the computer depending upon the size of the second hard drive and the
specific make and model of the two mobile racks. Naturally, your desktop
computer case should have available two 5¼" bays to house the mobile racks.
Mobile racks come in two basic versions, depending upon whether the hard
drive to be housed is an IDE/ATA or SCSI device. In addition, mobile racks
designed to accommodate the recently introduced SATA hard drives are just
coming onto the market.
The software program I use for the cloning process is Symantec's Norton
Ghost 2003 which I've recently seen selling on the net for about (U.S.)$30
for the CD-only version (no retail box), which is really all you need.
(There's an older 2002 version of Ghost available which is considerably
cheaper than the 2002 version; in my experience the 2002 version works just
fine for straight cloning one hard drive to another hard drive regardless of
whether the file system is FAT32 or NTFS). Another cloning tool is the
installation disk that comes packaged with the retail boxed hard drives from
several manufactures, including Maxtor and Western Digital. There are other
disk cloning programs available, e.g., Powerquest's Drive Image and Acronis'
True Image among them, both of which seem to get favorable reviews, however,
I've had little or no experience with these programs so I cannot speak to
them.
When you consider the enormous advantages of having two removable hard
drives on your computer, the additional cost in equipping your computer in
this fashion pales into insignificance.
running as Master on the